Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (8351)	1/27/2017 5:53:17 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 356438

>> What I was taking issue was your proposal to destroy an anthill with a nuke. I do understand what it takes to design an impenetrable system. What I am questioning is the need to do something as drastic as you propose when the current system is workable. The opportunities for fraud are limited if you have an up-to-date voter registration list and reliable people checking off incoming voters. This has never been a huge issue for me. I certainly do not believe it affected the outcome of the last election. However, there is a fact that even if the risk is low, the consequences of being wrong could be substantial, so it pays to be careful. Before this year it had never crossed my mind that a candidate would go the extra mile to cheat. But we do know that at least one person working for DNC claimed -- in an interview -- that "busloads" of people could easily be moved about to vote multiple times in an election. I have no idea if that is done or not, but I know some campaigns have enough cash to take advantage of the technique if it is. Fraud is difficult because there is someone just as smart as anyone else who is perpetrating it and they are spending a lot of time to hide it. No fraud case I have ever been associated with was proved adequately to get a conviction. The point being that fraud is extremely difficult to detect in many circumstances. As a young CPA studying auditing, it was a hard concept to understand that when you go into an audit the client engagement letter must specify that if there is fraud, the audit cannot be counted on to find it (see also: Enron). IF you find it you obvious will report on it, but you're not guaranteeing anyone you can find it. (Doesn't matter -- the accountants always get sued anyway and usually lose). Only later did I come to understand that a lot of fraud is committed by really smart people who aren't amateurs and were smarter than I was. I'm just skeptical I suppose, and I think it is easily fixed. I do agree it will cost some money to conduct a rigorous examination of it, but I would think it could be done with stat sampling of relatively few ballots to give you 95% or even a 99% CI without a tremendous investment. I would probably want it to be done on 10% of years going forward selected randomly.